212 comments:

Unemployment is one of the weirdest things to see reported. The numbers get all twisted and bendy and make no sense. Discouraged/given up workers should be counted, but how do you do that fairly? How do you know someone gave up finding work because it is too hard compared to someone who gave up for different reasons?

I was stunned to see the Star Tribune report announcing that the unemployment rate fell, but calling the number of jobs added "weak" and that it may slow momentum the Pres. hoped to gain from his Convention. Usually the paper is a blatant cheerleader.

It's brilliant nuanced economic planning. If you get more people to leave the workforce, the unemployment rate will continue to move lower. The goal is to get everyone out of the workforce and declare a 0% unemployment rate.

Then you throw up your hands and walk away- ala Costanza- leaving on high note. "I'm outta here".

AllenS, in the DNC liveblog you linked to a guy who does a standup routine as Obama. My favorite line from that bit applies in this thread: "I'm running for reelection because it would be stupid to give up a job in this economy!"

There is a "labor force participation rate" stat that is meaningful. Even that is "seasonally adjusted" so there is a dose of bullshit. I mean, how do you "seasonally adjust" the number of people working divided by the population over age 16? Still, here it is: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000/

Sliding downward from 63.8% in June, to 63.7% in July, and 63.5% in August.

That sounds more like what's really going on.

Also, if people "give up looking for work" that doesn't necessarily mean "forever". It means that, for the moment, they believe that the odds of finding work are so low that it doesn't justify the costs of looking (and/or they are better off, all around, just living off government assistance). The more people who have just "given up" for the time being, the worse things are. And yet, the official unemployment rate turns this into a positive thing? Sounds WAY off.

Want to know something funny? I learned all about labor force participation rates, "hidden" unemployment, etc. during my college years when Bush was president to try and make 5-6% unemployment sound scary. Now, during the news, I rarely hear detailed talks about these things to the same scope and level as I did while I was in college. Do they just assume that everyone knows these things now?

Reporting was pretty honest this morning but you know by tomorrow the msn will just be reporting the .2% reduction in the unemployment rate, and touting it as an example of 'progress'. And you can count on the unemployment rate dropping below 8% next month. Optics dont you know.

Math really is hard. Maybe it's good for the government to lie to us, though. If we all feel good about the economy, maybe that will help the economy. Right? And if we feel bad about it, that hurts the economy. So Browndog above, and Jay, and Matthew Sablan, are bad people! Because they said bad things about the economy and employment, even though true!

If the stock market continues to go higher, Romney has to make two points

Also....interest rates on (so called) 'risk free' investments is so low that money managers and individual investors have no place else to go to try to get ANY return on investment than the stock market.

As money managers you have to try to get a return with balancing risk.. Since bonds in muni's are now a high risk investment and even US Treasuries are a higher risk investment.....dividend paying stocks and reits are pretty much all that is left for income.

Thank GOD I'm not in the biz anymore.

As to unemployment. In addition to the numbers of people who are just NOT looking for work and are on SSI or welfare....the numbers of people working under the table and for cash at menial jobs or in day labor jobs are impossible to calculate. People are making do and trying to stay under the radar. Real unemployment in my little section of the world is probably well over 20%.

Also, there is another factor that I have seen and felt. It's VERY hard to measure, and perhaps impossible to measure accurately.

A huge quality-of-life impact for those who do have jobs, is the notion that one had best stay where he/she is. That means that there is a growing number of people who are happy to have a job, but not happy to go there each day.

Maybe the boss is a jerk. Maybe it's just time to move on. Maybe that well-deserved promotion has not come because of the economy, and the worker really is meant to have a higher-level position that isn't there. Maybe someone has wanted a career change for a long time, but since 2008 has been taking a "wait and see" approach, so she can still pay the mortgage. Maybe he's wanted to move to a different city for 5 years now, but figures it's best to stay where he at least has a job.

Whatever it is, this stuff can make people who DO have jobs feel trapped. Over time, I think this can have a real impact.

There's something about the odds of finding work that impacts even those who already have jobs, sometimes profoundly.

It's some part of a "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness index" that probably can't be measured, but is quite real.

Barry, thanks for the info. I personally know quite a few who are doing this, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with them, except that they can't find a job, or a job that pays much. They are 30, 40, 50 years old. SS will go broke even faster than planned if this keeps up, and I suspect that it will.

Another point about these stats that most folks don't understand is that the numbers in the monthly jobs report actually come from two completely different surveys. The "jobs added" number comes from what is called the payroll survey. It's a survey of businesses. Because it's a survey rather than a complete count, there is a significant error factor that is never reported. The unemployment rate info comes from a survey of households. The household survey has an implicit "jobs added" number that can be easily calculated, and sometimes it's way, way different that what the payroll number says. Over time, the two tend to converge, but on a month-to-month basis they can be dramatically different.

But there's a hidden issue there with spouses who do not work, students, etc. They're performing a species of uncompensated work -- they're not like NEETs on the dole. I like having the variety of statistics we have, even if it does allow politicians/journalists to lie. Monitoring the working-age NEET rate (do we already do this?) would be a helpful addition to the existing statistics, though.

Rigging the outcome to cover up for the Obama Depression is the only job that the labor department takes seriously as the end nears.

UNEXPECTEDLY, trillions per year borrowed to create nearly nothing for job seekers will bear its intended fruit, which is to crash the US Dollar thus starting a crisis that only a New World Agency can pretend to regulate using Cap and Trade trillions sucked out of the USA to build their New World governance infrastructure and Army.

Why else are the USA's Federal Agencies all arming and laying in enough ammo to wage civil war on any opposition for several years to come?

That is kind of what they have been doing the last several years. We get the quarterly reports on page 1 and then 2-3 weeks later a short article in the bottom left corner of page E-18, that on re-running the numbers, it was found that the GDP was not quite that good after all, and the unemployment was a little worse.

Your poll shows that most engaged voters understand the worthless of the unemployment figure. It is just like calculating "core inflation" by excluding energy and food. But, as we know, a huge percentage of voters are not engaged or even minimally informed.

"How does the unemployment rate fall when you're only getting 64% of the new jobs you need to keep up with the growing population?"

There is only one answer to this question and it is "C." The unemployment rate is employment/people seeking work. There is no anomaly in having both a falling unemployment rate and a falling employment/population ratio; it simply means that the percentage of people looking for work is falling.

The other answers are just wrong (except "Math is hard," in the sense that math does appear to be hard for anyone who doesn't understand this). It's embarrassing for a law professor not to know these things or to pretend not to.

These are hard things to measure with precision. Plus there are all kinds of arcane seasonal adjustments which only the statistical geeks understand. It's not a numerical count but a statistical estimate, which at best can show trends. The trend is not good.

And so much for the feckless stories out yesterday that the numbers were going to be "much better" than expected and that Obama (who knows the numbers before we do) would have trouble containing the fact.

A valuable number to track would be % of people who are NET tax payers. Use an average cost per person for government. The fact that someone has a job, but still pays less than they take out is still a weakness in the system not a strength. The important thing is how many people are pulling the wagon compared to sitting in it.

just have time for a quick comment...don't know if anyone made the point, but a lot of these jobs that were "created" this past month were teachers/janitors/principals etc, all start back at school. It is a damn it brain fart... anyway it was to be expected/predicted/but the overall effect is it deflates the number of jobless.

Someplace I read that more people applied for Social Security disability last month than found new jobs. . . . Meantime, I think those OSHA folks need to get busy.

It is hard to blame people who are in need of the money to live.

But increases in the number of people on government assistance is not that big a problem to the Obama folks. Instead, it is a plus -- they want people to be dependent upon government. Government is the only thing we all belong to.

@BarryD, I wasn't blaming them. I just missed being laid off myself not long ago. I blame the people who came into Washington asserting that they and they alone knew how to get the US back to prosperity.

Turns out that demonizing small business owners and a policy of continuous social science experiments foisted on the population at large doesn't work.

Math really is hard. Maybe it's good for the government to lie to us, though. If we all feel good about the economy, maybe that will help the economy. Right? And if we feel bad about it, that hurts the economy.

But why else do we attempt to measure "consumer confidence"?

There's a Chesterton essay from some time in '30 or '31 about this "if we all just think that the economy is getting better, it will get better" mentality. He said that it was an American idea, and essentially identical to Christian Science. I think he was right.

AF said... The other answers are just wrong (except "Math is hard," in the sense that math does appear to be hard for anyone who doesn't understand this). It's embarrassing for a law professor not to know these things or to pretend not to.

The professor gets it. And her question is: Why doesn't the political media get it?

Is it embarassing for them? Or for you as a lefty criticizing others about their cognitive ability?

3. Republican lies that Free Trade that guts US industry magically grows the US economy and creates more jobs in America in the long haul. And EVEN BETTER PAYING JOBS THAN THE ONES LOST!!

4. Republican lies that tax cuts for the rich, started in 2001 by Bush and perpetuated by Obama - create jobs. Especially since the Rich are retitled "The Jobs Creators" by Republican bootlickers to wealthy donors.

5. Democrat lies that "investing" in McMansions for welfare mommas, economically unviable green energy, and in hiring more hero government employees - magically makes America more competitive and will grow our economy.

Obama seems to think of himself as a latter-day FDR, yet the solutions that worked (if they did) in FDR's day won't necessarily work in ours.

In FDRs day, massive federal spending could be expected to increase aggregate demand in the USA, at least temporarily.

But in our of globalized trade, much of that aggregate demand is sourced from offshore suppliers, thus doing little for the USA's economy.

I realize that's an oversimplification, yet it's hard not to see Obama doubling-down on economic policies that are just not working.

And someday all this massive spending will have to be paid for. When interest rates finally return to historical levels (as they surely will), the cost of servicing the national debt will rise sharply.

When it does, it will have to be paid for either with massive tax increases or significant inflation of the currency, or both. Either of these will seriously handicap the long-term prospects for the U.S. economy.

So perhaps the question is, are we headed for a "lost decade," or will it be more like a "lost generation"?

Whatever it is, the cost of this profligacy will not be small. Considering the cost what, exactly, do we have to show for it?

Michelle Dulak Thomson, I don't know why we measure consumer confidence. I'm not in the polling business. It's like the "right direction / wrong direction" polls, and polls about which candidate you'd rather have a beer with. Silly stuff.

The economy does not care how people feel about the economy. How people feel about the economy does affect the economy, but far less than the party in power would like to think.

These monthly unemployment numbers always remind me of the joke about the three interviewees for an accounting job where the deciding question was “What does two plus two equal?”

The first candidate, Bill, answers “Of course the answer is four.” The next candidate, Jon, quickly responds “Everyone knows that the answer is four.” The last candidate, Curt, pauses for a second before he answers “What number would you like it to be?” Curt of course got the job.

The math is fairly straightforward, but we've been conditioned to focus on the unemployment rate and not on the measures that go into its calculation. Looking at the comments, it's clear that many here understand that the participation rate, which determines the denominator of the unemployment rate, is at historic lows.

Surprisingly, even the left-leaning blogs and papers this morning are acknowledging that the August jobs report is awful.

I've never understood the whole "gives up looking for work" thing. Assuming that you do need to work (like most people), who gives up looking? I know that some people will decide that they really can swing being a stay at home parent, or to take earlier than planned retirement, but those people must be very few. If you are out of work and not in either of those situations, aren't you always looking to some degree?

The fact that Obama hasn't paid off his mortgage has baffled me over the past couple of years. He could do it with a small percentage of his wealth but he continues to pay interest on his home loan to his own detriment.

The story linked above is about Ben Bernanke. He did something very stupid with his personal finances.

How does the unemployment rate fall when you're only getting 64% of the new jobs you need to keep up with the growing population?

The umemployed number comes from people collecting unemployment.When those people are no longer eligible to collect unemployment, they go to unemployment limbo... They are no longer counted among the unemployed... but they are not employed either.

Sarah Palin was right and Obama was wrong about everything.http://riehlworldview.com/?p=20862

His own words hang him completely. Two things that stick out though. One is his inherent loathing of capitalism. He cites the 9 months of job loss and mocks Mccainsposition that the economy was sound (though of course now is saying we need to be patient as the economy is on the right track despite atrocious numbers). But then he says such policies (bush,s policies/ conservative policies whatever he's arguing against) NEVER work, as if that 9 months of job loss was the norm for said Bush era policies. Up until the collapse the unemployment rate was in the mid 4% low 5% (which of course,he and other dems were demagoging as horrible numbers). Up until the bubble popped the housing market was gangbusters. It is simply not a act that such policies NEVER work.Then he says we need to go back to the 90's when such policies DID work, I.e. Clinton. This is doubly stupid because Clinton was the president who oversaw the deregulation of the banks that Obama claims caused the housing bubble. He also forced banks to loosen standards under CRA to those who couldn't afford traditional loans. He also pushed NAFTA etc etc. pretty much everything that Obama hates about conservative polices was what Clinton's economic policies were about. He and other dems seem to have this shallow notion of the economy that boils down to, it doesn't matter what the policies are, because clinto oversaw a positive economy and was a democrat, then because Obama is also a democrat whatever policies he puts out will produce the same result. Or that it doesn't matter if you even have the opposite policy of your predecessor, what matters is that you're of the same party and rtherefore can hang on to their coattails and get the same results simply by being a democrat.Obama should have studied Clinton's presidency more and recognize that he initially governed from the left and tried raising taxes, but then after getting shellacked at the mid term elections pivoted to the center and ran the economy more from a centrist/conservative position.

That's Obamas problem. He never pivoted. Worse, he is telegraphing that he won't pivot. He's going to ride this lack of recovery to the end rather than adopt it that perhaps those policies he derided do in fact work.

It's also doubly bad because to get elected he had to pretend to pivot and suggest he was that centrist (which might be why people like althouse fell for his shtick and said McCain was worse on the economy). He said stuff like bush raising the debt to 4 trillion was both irresponsible and unpatriotic even. Suggesting that he understood that bloated govt was irresponsible for those rubes who believe that stuff. It wasn't true, but it was good enough to get people like Chris buckley to think Obama was reasonable.

The "giving up looking for work" doesn't mean what it says. It refers to the unemployment figure which is a measure not of people who are not working, but of people who are receiving government benefits after being involuntarily terminated from their jobs. Those people in all likelihood are still looking for work, and remain in the "not participating in the labor force" figures.

Can't be. What if everyone but one guy is employed, and that guy is seeking work? Then the unemployment rate is 35 billion percent.

It's 1 - (people with jobs)/(people with jobs + people looking for jobs). When people looking for jobs is zero, the unemployment rate is zero, unless no one has a job AND no one is looking, in which case it's undefined. Which makes sense.

I know how the unemployment rate is counted. I also know (and have seen at work) how one can get what ends up being argentina-style hackery that makes fudge-factor "hard decisions" that get the numbers in the direction you want to move them. I vote "lying" on this one.

AF said... Can you please explain what I got wrong? Thanks in advance.

I explained it for you here:

Marshal said... AF said... The other answers are just wrong (except "Math is hard," in the sense that math does appear to be hard for anyone who doesn't understand this). It's embarrassing for a law professor not to know these things or to pretend not to.

The professor gets it. And her question is: Why doesn't the political media get it?

Is it embarassing for them? Or for you as a lefty criticizing others about their cognitive ability?

9/7/12 9:56 AM

I love it when those completely missing the point insult others' intelligence.

The job numbers are devastating. Any president with an ounce of empathy would at the very least have gotten the pipeline going from Canada to the Gulf, opened leases in the Gulf and expedited any and all energy exploration/drilling projects possible. It would not have made a big dent in these depressing numbers but it would have put a few hundred thousand people to work doing something of value that would have significant ramifications for the economy going forward. Instead we have a blow hard bull shit artist asking for a Mulligan.

..."But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.

The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.

The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.

"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim?"

more..What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool."

I've never understood the whole "gives up looking for work" thing. Assuming that you do need to work (like most people), who gives up looking? I know that some people will decide that they really can swing being a stay at home parent, or to take earlier than planned retirement, but those people must be very few. If you are out of work and not in either of those situations, aren't you always looking to some degree?

It means your unemployment has run out.

You could be getting SS Disability or working in the underground economy, but you don't have any kind of recognized job and aren't drawing unemployment.

The most surprising fact to me was that the effective tax rate is negative for the middle quintile. According to the CBO data, this number was +14 percent in 1979 (when the data begin) and remained positive through 2007. It was negative 0.5 percent in 2008, and negative 5 percent in 2009. That is, the middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess.

The BLS standard is anyone who has not actively looked for work for four weeks, the so-called "discouraged worker". These are people who think job-seeking is a waste of time. I can relate, having been in a similar situation during the downturn in the early eighties. You get to a point where you've done everything you can reasonably do, so you might as well take a walk in the park.

When I first started watching the Academy Awards decades (epochs?) ago, I was always struck by the respect accorded the two members of the accounting firm who "guarded" the cards that displayed the award winners. Generally, those people and their firm were trusted, both by Academy members and the general public. I never questioned the validity of the votes.

But what mechanisms exist in the arena of labor data reporting that should ensure our trust in the monthly status reports? Is ADP trustworthy? Is the federal government? The Chambers of Commerce?

We all go bonkers every month over the data shown to us. People's responses range from elation to despair. And the parsing of the data is endless. Does anyone ever vett the data before over-emoting?

In business, there was once an old saying that "figures never lie but liars always figure". But figures can lie. While in business, I learned that the scope, timing and quality of the data deeply affected the usefulness of the data in re-directing and implementing business decisions.

Management did not just take what was given them, they spent time reviewing and qualifying the data. Only when it was clear, to the best of human knowledge that the data was accurate and that it spoke to and measured correctly the things that needed measurement (not undefined, peripheral issues)were we alloeed to publish our reports. And of course, even then we were oft-times wrong.

The point is this - why do we allow ourselves to be routinely whipsawed by this (unvetted?) data? What if all parties had real confidence in data that was clean, focused, accurate and timely? Wouldn't that help everyone?

Consumer spending doesn't create jobs and consumer confidence is irrelevant. What does create jobs is investment and what ought to be measured is investor sentiment.

The stock market is up only because interest rates are so low that keeping your money in cash is a losing proposition leaving savers the only option of chasing yields and foreigners investing in the US as they flee an even worse disaster in Europe. If Europe was in better shape the dollar would have completely tanked by now and so would have the stock market.

Intelligent people make mistakes just like the stupid. The difference between the two is the intelligent persons learns from their mistake, the stupid don't. Setting aside rent seekers, there are a lot of stupid people in this country and they vote democrat. Anyone observing Obama bin Biden & Co. over the last 3 1/2 will conclude at best their IQ is room temperature.

Sure. BLS do. That's their job. One can say they do a bad job of it, or they need to do more validation work on their model, or whatever, but we're not getting raw, unvetted, off-the-cuff numbers here.

I understand that BLS's job is to present the numbers but they are clearly not infallible and that is the foundation for my concern that we overreact to inaccurate data:

I've never understood the whole "gives up looking for work" thing. Assuming that you do need to work (like most people), who gives up looking? I know that some people will decide that they really can swing being a stay at home parent, or to take earlier than planned retirement, but those people must be very few. If you are out of work and not in either of those situations, aren't you always looking to some degree?

Think she was trying to riff on the infamous Dwight Schrute (The Office) speech? Now that I did a YouTube search, I had not realized how much the young folks emulate that speech in their graduation ceremony speeches.

A lot of people can get by for a while. They can move to an employed relative's camper in the backyard, do odd jobs, sell stuff, etc. for a tiny income, and wait it out.

Again, they're not out of the labor force forever, but this is one way some people -- even those who don't qualify for SSDI -- get by. Have you not seen the lights on in campers, some, lately, in the 'burbs? Because I have.

How else can someone explain a labor force loss of hundreds of thousands per month? These people aren't all homeless. But they aren't doing well, either.

Paying your "fair share" of taxes is a constantly moving amount. Works out to be "more". Obama wants to be FDR? I have family who voted Democrat all their lives because of the WPA and construction jobs like Hoover dam. When Obama first proposed his stimulus, I reluctantly supported it because it was presented as another WPA project and I figured people could earn a living to bridge the recession, and we would get a lot of parks, streets and swimming pools out of it so there would be a tangible benefit from it. Instead the money was handed out to Obama supporters with nothing to show for it. Good job. And we want to do it again?

It's a damn good jobs report if you're a Republican, right? That's what the GOP was hoping for.

That's rather disengenuous. I think someone earlier mentioned the Keystone Pipeline project that would have created thousands of jobs, supported by the GOP and torpedoed by Obama.

We are finding out this nation is resource rich in energy which could provide tens of thousands of good paying jobs but for some reason, this administration would rather sink billions in pie in the sky green energy companies.

Garage. It is a horrible report. There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that? Dude you have a problem. You are one sick fellow. You would certainly feel better about yourself if you lost weight. Maybe your view of mankind would improve and your sanctimony would diminish along with your waistline and you could fathom that others have as much or more empathy for the poor than you.

Garage. It is a horrible report. There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that? Dude you have a problem. You are one sick fellow. You would certainly feel better about yourself if you lost weight. Maybe your view of mankind would improve and your sanctimony would diminish along with your waistline and you could fathom that others have as much or more empathy for the poor than you.

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Well I'm happy that it hurts Obama.

Not much for people to do about it except kick him out in favor of someone that actually knows something about economics.

SPImmortal said... Not his fault, he tried to reign in Fannie-Freddie. But Demcrats cried about him hating the poor or some such nonsense and we got a bunch of worthless loans and worthless derivatives.

Well, they weren't worthless to Franklin Raines. He left Fannie just before the accounting scandal hit with a $20 million dollar bonus.

There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that?

Without a fucking doubt. You seriously expect me to believe that Romney/Ryan were hoping for an awesome jobs report? This is the same party that is happy with losing over 700k public sector jobs, and wanted GM and Chrysler to die on the vine, losing a million more jobs. Please, save it.

There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that?

Without a fucking doubt. You seriously expect me to believe that Romney/Ryan were hoping for an awesome jobs report? This is the same party that is happy with losing over 700k public sector jobs, and wanted GM and Chrysler to die on the vine, losing a million more jobs. Please, save it.

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It's not that we hope Obama will fail, it's just that we know he will fail. Socialism and central planning never work, never have, never will. You can look to Europe for plenty of examples of that. Why would you want to recreate those conditions here and overload us will debt until we keel over?

And Republicans didn't want GM to die. They wanted structural changes that would help GM be more competitive in the long run. And what did Obama push the courts to do? Screw the creditors and pay off his union clients. Now GM is where it was before, losing money hand over fist and withering away.

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.....14.7%

garage mahal said... There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that?

Without a fucking doubt. You seriously expect me to believe that Romney/Ryan were hoping for an awesome jobs report? This is the same party that is happy with losing over 700k public sector jobs, and wanted GM and Chrysler to die on the vine, losing a million more jobs. Please, save it.

So by garage's logic Obama and Democrats were rooting for a banking crisis and the collapse of the US banking industry back in 2008. Were they rooting for American servicement to be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan also?

Also, if people "give up looking for work" that doesn't necessarily mean "forever".

No, it doesn't, but statistically people who are out of work for a long time have a hard time reentering the workforce when the economy recovers. Some of them never do.

They had a segment on this on NPR a few months back. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the impression was as a society we're going to be dealing with pathologies relating to long term unemployment long after the recession is over.

If GM and Chrysler had gone through ordinary BK They would both be alive and well today with right-sized pensions and labor contracts. As it is we will bail one of them out again. Unlikely Chrysler will be given a third try. Many auto companies have gone out of business through the years. No one cries about, much less remembers, Hudson. Or Studebaker.

Every bad jobs number is just another reminder that what we have been trying, and promising, isnt working.

PS. I read that there are school districts in Wisc now enjoying a surplus. Why arent you cheering that?

Back when hitchhiking still seemed like a sane activity, I got picked up by a guy in a Golden Hawk. I was not immediately impressed. As we drove, the guy bragged on his Hawk in an understated way. As he drove away I drank in those lines with a slightly more appreciative eye. I've been a fan ever since. I haven't checked this out lately, but I believe there is a car dealer in Beverly Hills that deals only in restored Studebakers.

The faux concern for the lives of 700k public sector workers losing their jobs is touching though.

The question really is not whether republicans have compassion with those who lost there jobs, though. The question is what is the best way to show such compassion. Just re-hiring government workers, and sending the bill to the next few generations is not how I would show compassion.

I've been unemployed, I know what its like. Keeps you up at night, just about every night. You worry a hell of a lot. I feel bad for anyone who has lost their job - private or public sector. More of the same though, is not the answer.

What does it say about you that you have to be 100% convinced of transparent lies in order to justify your political positions?

If you really believe that the GOP wants high unemployment to get Obama out of the White House, then you are admitting that Democrats think a fetus is a human from conception, but just enjoys the thrill of legal infanticide.

If you really believe that the GOP wants high unemployment to get Obama out of the White House, then you really want to impose communism on the US and put all dissenters into reform-through-labor-until-you-die camps.

Do you admit that you are truly that evil? Or do you admit that your assertions about conservatives is stupid and wrong?

If you really believe that the GOP wants high unemployment to get Obama out of the White House, then you really want to impose communism on the US and put all dissenters into reform-through-labor-until-you-die camps.

Really. My father had two Hudsons when I was a kid. Great cars. The man who live 3 doors down from me as I grew up was president of the Studebaker Drivers Club. He kept about a dozen Studs on hand. The Avantis and Hawks were beautiful cars. He once offered to sell me one for $2,500. To this day I regret not buying it.

I believe that Garage's school district is one on the ones that rammed through new contracts without shopping for lower health insurance providers, having teachers pay into benefits etc, etc before the new laws went into effect.

That left them as one of the districts riffing teachers and still going red financially rather than one of the districts that changed their benefits, chose new health insurance providers, kept classroom staffing and went black financially.

I believe that Garage's school district is one on the ones that rammed through new contracts without shopping for lower health insurance providers, having teachers pay into benefits etc, etc before the new laws went into effect.

I believe you've mentioned that your district is either in Madison proper or just outside (which makes little difference).

Well. then when did they sign contracts?

Before the law changed and how long before and how long were/are they stuck with the contract?

Or after the law went into effect and ignored leveraging it's provisions?

There are districts that were projecting deficits that leveraged the law and now have or are projecting surpluses. And please do not play dumb and ask me to provide you the list etc. It's been beaten to death here on Althouse already.

Without being specific about your school districts actions - whether they took advantage of the lifeline Walker extended to them - your comment about the deficit in your school district was meaningless when considered in the context of the discussion.

But the numbers here are ones I actually figured out myself when we got the "jobs added" numbers for July.

I thought... wow, that's pretty low considering the population of the US is well over 300 million.

And I wondered... Hey, what is the number of babies born every month. I wonder how that would compare. So I looked up and found birth rates for 2010 for one year and divided by 12. Yes, people die, too, but they also immigrate.

Really rough number crunching and ball parking showed that the "jobs added" in July most likely held us even. At best.

There millions of people without jobs and you think Republicans are happy about that?

I think they were expecting that. Just as Democrats reveled in the war dead for so many years. I never thought they were monsters who wanted people to die, but they were expecting a bad end to the wars, which was precisely why they argued for alternatives.

At the end of the day, I genuinely believe that most Democrats and most Republicans want what is best for the country, but have different ways of pursuing that best.

For Republicans, it does help there is a bad jobs report now, because it would be worse to have a good job reports now but continued no growth and bad job reports all of 2013 and beyond, which is the expectation.

I do know that there millions of people without jobs and Democrats caused that.

Paddy O: Well put. The truth is there were not, and could not, be any "good" jobs numbers given where we are and the metrics from manufacturing, retail, real estate, etc continuing to be anemic. We are talking about a lot more pain for people without jobs and the solution is not in grandiose promises but in boring steps that will have to be taken to make the turn. A good start would be to stop badmouthing business, stop turning one half of the country against the other, slashing regulations with a loud flourish. All of these things would serve to change the mood which will change the economy. Sentiment has to shift.